Comment by matt-attack
9 hours ago
And we’ve literally born witness to yet another step in the trend of diluting our corpus of pronouns. The trend is very clearly from more articulate to less.
“They” and “their” for my whole lifetime were plurals. Now we’ve pretty much lost the mere clarity of knowing if the pronoun means 1 person or more than 1 person. Was watching “Adolescence” and the police mentioned “they” in regards to the victim of a crime. I was mistakenly under the impression that there weee multiple victims for much of the episode.
I’m very clearly slow to adapt to the new definitions.
The article points out that Chaucer used "they" to refer to singular unknown person, so the usage is very old. It seems more respectful than assuming they are male.
I find myself wrong all the time, and I'm glad for the lesson!
Leaning on Chaucer isn't sufficient, because it was once a pronoun used for people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(pronoun)
So maybe we should bring back it, or ignore Chaucer as an authority.
The point isn't that we should all speak like Chaucer, it's that singular they isn't a new thing within our lifetimes.
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"They" has been used as a singular pronoun continuously since Chaucer. Shakespeare used it. Dickens used it.
Even people who complain about the singular "they" use it when they're not paying attention. It's a regular part of the English language.
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"They" has always (in our lifetimes) been used to refer to a singular person of unknown gender. For example "someone left their coat here. They must be cold"
Indeed. What's new is not referring to someone of unknown gender as "they", but rather people identifying as non-gender-specific, and wanting to be referred to as "they". That's the part that feels so awkward, IMHO, not simply they as one person.
No that's incorrect. Use his/he or her/she if the coat appears to be one that would be worn by a male or female. If uncertain, use male pronouns, which are gender neutral in that scenario.
There is a difference between "correct" and "how it is actually used by real people."